The CD adapco Group has announced the release of its new products, STAR-Pro/E and Comet-Pro/E, which provide a choice of CFD solvers as plug-ins for Pro/ENGINEER systems for the very first time.

STAR-Pro/E & Comet-Pro/E are highly capable plug-ins, developed to meet the demands of product engineers for a single CAD and CFD solution that can speed product development, cut costs and improve product design. With tight integration of CFD with CAD, parametric design studies are made easier through enhanced automation and bi-directional communication between CAD and CFD models.

The advantage of both choices is that they enable model setup, calculation and result evaluation to be completely integrated within the Pro/ENGINEER environment. Engineers who are familiar with CAD will therefore find adding CFD to existing models easy and intuitive, since boundary conditions and fluid properties are simply entered within the familiar Pro/ENGINEER GUI environment.

The two options differ in their level of functionality. Comet-Pro/E is designed for design engineers who need to add uncomplicated CFD to their familiar Pro/ENGINEER environment. Modern and unique automatic polyhedral mesh generation means the fastest model setup and solution times. Users can quickly assess different what-if design scenarios. This is achieved through the modeling of single domain steady-state incompressible flows and the use of low cell count polyhedral meshes. An option to account for turbulence and heat exchange, driven through imposed boundary conditions (temperature or flux) is also available.

STAR-Pro/E goes one step further, offering complete compatibility with the leading CFD solution STAR-CD, allowing highly complex physics to be modeled directly within the Pro/ENGINEER environment. A breadth of flow and heat and mass transfer regimes can be handled, together with chemical reaction and combustion, multiphase and multiphysics capabilities.

Steve MacDonald, General Manager of the CD adapco Group, explains the benefits: "The tight integration of CFD with CAD in the STAR-Pro/E & Comet-Pro/E bundles offers a powerful combination of easy entry into 'simple' flow simulation with unlimited headroom to access the most advanced CFD when needed. We are the first CFD company to be offering such a solution which I am confident will successfully meet the needs of design engineers, development engineers and researchers industry-wide".